The day my AOL disk collection hit 47 discs and I finally quit

I remember around 1997 my dad had this shoebox under his desk with all these AOL trial CDs. One day I actually counted them out of boredom and there were 47 discs from different versions and offers. It's wild how they'd just mail them to your house whether you wanted them or not, like spam you couldn't delete. I think the free hours were always like 500 or 1000 at a time but you'd burn through them quick on dialup. What did you guys do with your old AOL discs? Mine ended up as coasters.

2 comments

2 Comments

andrew74d ago

I had a friend in 1998 who used like 30 AOL discs to make a weird mosaic of his dog on his bedroom wall (it looked awful but we pretended it was art). He drilled holes in the centers and threaded string through them, hung them up like some kind of terrible mobile. I still remember the specific smell of those discs, that plasticky, cheap CD-ROM scent mixed with whatever cologne he was wearing that day.

felix3854d ago

andrew7 that cologne detail is what really gets me, like yeah we all remember the discs but the sensory memory of someone else's cheap drugstore body spray mixed in is next level. my buddy rob did something similar in 2002 but with those free AOL coaster discs and a hot glue gun, he tried to make a lampshade for his dorm room. thing caught fire after like 20 minutes because the glue melted and the whole thing just drooped onto the bulb, smelled like burning plastic and regret. we told him it looked "postmodern" just to spare his feelings, but honestly it just looked like a melted frisbee. the real tragedy is he still has that charred pile of discs in his parents' basement and brings it up every thanksgiving like it's some lost masterpiece.